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From: lseltzer@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Linda Ann Seltzer)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Categories of Musicological Analysis
Message-ID: <2006@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 21 Aug 90 22:47:49 GMT
References: <1918@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <9956@life.ai.mit.edu> <14638@venera.isi.edu>
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In article <14638@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
>In article <9956@life.ai.mit.edu> mrsmith@rice-chex.UUCP (Mr. P. H. Smith)
>writes:
>>
>>Do you think that "rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyrics" are "Western
>>musical procedures?"  I don't, and I don't think any non-western
>>musician would agree with you, if you arrogantly claim that rhythm,
>>melody, harmony, and lyrics are Western musical procedures.
>
>Let me try to come to Linda's defense here.  I do not think her intent was to
>be quite as arrogant as you are assuming.  The way I interpreted her original
>claim was as an assertion that TERMS such as "rhythm," "melody," "harmony,"
>and "lyrics" need not necessarily have clean maps to concepts in all
>non-Western civilizations.  You are probably too young to remember McLuhan's

I'll make some more specific comments.  First I never said that rhythm,
melody, harmony, and lyrics are Western procedures only.  The division
into those categories implies a Western bias.

Harmony is certainly a characteristic of Western music.  Harmony
exists to some degree in the Japanese sho, an instrument with 15 pipes,
but in other Japanese music, where heterophony is a more relevant
principle.  Harmony is not an important concern in the ragas of India,
nor is it importnt in most music of Korea, China or Africa.

The most problematic term is "lyrics", because it clearly a Western
term.  "Lyrics" is a term normally used in Western popular music
and implies procedures and goals which might not be present in
the non-Western musician's mind.  The closest one can come in
non-Western music is in the Chinese k'un-chu opera, in which the
composer had the reponsibility of composing poetry for existing
tunes, although the coposer did treat the existing tunes very freely.
But the opposite procedure in Hindustani music - taking a sentence
(e.g. from a proverb) and peforming improvisations in which other
syllables are inserted, or in which the word's syllables are treated
freely as phonetic elements - is not similar to the procedures
or intentions experienced by a Western composer of "lyrics".
In Western music, we do not expect lyrics to be great poetry.  In
Chinese k'un-chu opera, the texts are more important than the music
and are treated as literature.

Rhythm - Recurring beats, even in an irregular meter, do not occur in
all forms of music.  Most notably - the old shakuhachi pieces and
some Tibetan Buddhist chanting. But I haven't encountred a culture
which doesn't employ rhythm at all.
When I think about it more, I can find more Western types of music for
which the notion of rhythm is problematic, for example, computer music
based on speech processing.

The only culture I can think of that may not have melody is Eskimo
music.

If one restricts categorization to these four elements, then one loses a
great deal of perspcetive concerning such matters as timbre and
organization of lines into larger structures.